Amy Senser case: Victim would be first to forgive her, mother says

Amy Senser, left, and Eric Nelson, right, enter the Hennepin County Government Center before hearing the jury's verdict in her hit-and-run case on Thursday, May 3, 2012, in Minneapolis. (Pioneer Press: ben Garvin)

Amy Senser stood arrow-straight, arms to her side and the tips of her manicured fingers resting on the counsel table before her.

Two times, a judge's clerk read, "Guilty."

Then he said, "Not guilty," followed by another "Guilty."

Except for the tears that began streaming down her face, Senser froze and didn't vary her pose for minutes, not until her husband, former Minnesota Vikings player Joe Senser, came to give her a hug.

Senser, 45, of Edina, was found guilty Thursday, May 3, in Hennepin County District Court of two felony counts of criminal vehicular homicide and a misdemeanor count of careless driving in the Aug. 23 hit-and-run death of Anousone Phanthavong, 38, of Roseville, head chef at Minneapolis' True Thai restaurant.

The jury of seven men and five women acquitted her of another felony count of criminal vehicular homicide, one accusing her of grossly negligent driving.

"In the end, they did justice," Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman said of the jurors.

Those jurors toiled nearly 19 hours over three days to reach a verdict, and the strain of each of those hours showed as they filed slowly into the Minneapolis courtroom of Judge Daniel Mabley to deliver their verdict.

One woman wiped away tears as she walked in. Another appeared to have had recently been crying.

Senser was allowed to remain free until sentencing July 9, two weeks before the civil wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Phanthavong's family against the Sensers is to go to trial.

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As a first-time offender, Senser faces four years in prison, under state sentencing guidelines. Her attorney, Eric Nelson, promised an appeal and said he'll ask a judge for a sentence shorter than what the guidelines call for.

After the verdict, he said Senser "has struggled with her inability" to talk to Phanthavong's family about what she maintains was an unfortunate, unavoidable accident.

But the dead man's mother, Keo Phanthavong, said her son would have forgiven the woman who killed him.

"He just didn't hold grudges. If somehow he would've lived, he would've been the first one in the family to forgive Amy Senser," the Laotian immigrant said through an interpreter.

"He was kind that way. He was a very good man."

Phanthavong was 13 days old when his mother carried him from their village in Laos to the Mekong River to escape the Communist Pathet Lao; his father, Phouxay Phanthavong, was a marked man, having fought for the Royal Lao Army and the CIA.

Both parents were in the courtroom as the verdicts were read. Neither showed much emotion.

Anousone Phanthavong came to America in 1990, the same year Joe Senser married Amy Olson. Just as Joe Senser would find his post-Vikings life as a restaurateur, Phanthavong would find his calling as a chef, and his cooking helped propel True Thai to acclaim.

The paths of Phanthavong and Amy Senser crossed just after 11 p.m. Aug. 23. He was driving to the restaurant on his day off to give the cleaning crew a ride home, but he ran out of gas on the Riverside Avenue exit ramp of westbound Interstate 94.

He turned on his flashers and guided his silver 2004 Honda Accord Sport Coupe as far onto the right shoulder as he could.

He filled an old antifreeze jug with gasoline at a nearby gas station. As he stood next to his car, Senser, driving a 2009 Mercedes-Benz ML350 SUV, steered off the interstate onto the exit going perhaps 55 mph. She was looking for a place to turn around and get onto eastbound I-94 to return to St. Paul to pick up her daughters and two of their friends from a Katy Perry concert.

Testifying in her defense, Senser said it was dark, she was looking to her left to see the bridge and she never saw Phanthavong, who stood 5-foot-2 and weighed 135 pounds.

The impact threw him about 50 feet and caused severe injuries; a pathologist testified that he died within minutes.

Senser said she felt a "jolt" and described the sound as a "clunk." She said she thought she'd hit a construction barricade from the paving work being done on Riverside - work that had closed the bridge she'd hoped to cross.

She drove on. The next day, after she and her husband surveyed the damage on the car, they called a lawyer. After meeting with lawyers from the firm Nelson works for, they came home, told their two teenage daughters to pack bags and headed out for an overnight trip to Stillwater.

They didn't want the daughters home that night when the lawyer called the Minnesota State Patrol and told them that the vehicle investigators had been searching for was in the Sensers' garage.

Nine days later, Senser acknowledged she had been driving the vehicle at the time of the crash.

Trial testimony stretched over six days, and the state's case - that Senser was probably intoxicated, knew she hit Phanthavong and fled to avoid being tested for alcohol - was circumstantial.

That case was laid out by Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Deborah Russell, a 17-year veteran of the prosecutor's office. She introduced 24 witnesses and 119 exhibits over five days.

Even as the verdicts were read in court, they didn't seem to sink in with the defendant. She stood motionless beside Nelson as Mabley set a sentencing date, thanked jurors and told the packed courtroom (whose doors were held open so those standing outside could hear the verdicts) that court was in recess.

Senser, who worked in a chiropractic clinic, remained standing still for minutes. Finally, Brad Idelkope, Mabley's law clerk and the one who had read the verdicts into the record, handed her a copy of the form reminding her when she must come to court for sentencing.

Afterward, Nelson said the verdicts were "certainly not what we expected."

"She is not the type of person who would knowingly leave a man in the road to die," he said of his client.

The jury believed she was.

They convicted her of two variations of criminal vehicular homicide. One count accused her of causing Phanthavong's death and leaving the scene. The other accused her of causing his death and failing to give notice of the accident "by the quickest means of communication to law enforcement authorities."

In order to find her guilty of those charges, jurors had to conclude Senser knew at the time or immediately after that she had caused injury or killed a person or had damaged another vehicle.

There was no direct evidence she knew. But as Mabley had instructed jurors, they could infer such knowledge from circumstantial evidence, and such testimony and exhibits made up much of the prosecution's case.

Among the exhibits were phone records showing a flurry of calls to Senser right after the crash; her daughters said they were trying to find her because she hadn't picked them up from the concert. Her husband also called her.

There was evidence she had deleted texts from her cellphone from that evening and all the next day after the crash, although texts from before and after remained on her phone.

In her closing argument, Russell said there was no way Senser could not have heard the impact.

"You have the metal of this vehicle bending," Russell said. "You have the headlight shattering."

She said it was nothing like the sound of hitting a plastic construction barricade, two of which she had entered into evidence as exhibits.

Russell contended there was evidence Senser had been drinking. The only direct evidence of that came from Senser, who testified she'd had part of a glass of wine about two hours before the crash.

Also, a friend of her daughter's testified that one of Senser's daughters complained that their mom failed to pick them up because perhaps she'd been drinking. Although the daughter denied saying it when she was called to the stand.

Lastly, when Joe Senser picked up his daughters and they arrived home that night, they found Amy Senser asleep on a couch on the open front deck of the couple's home.

Russell told jurors Senser was "passed out."

Joe Senser and the couple's daughters were called as witnesses by the prosecution, and they said they saw no evidence of intoxication and didn't smell booze on her that night.

The defense called five witnesses and introduced 27 exhibits in two days of testimony. Three were expert witnesses, and one was a State Patrol trooper.

But Nelson was counting on Senser to be her own star witness.

She spent two hours and 25 minutes on the witness stand. She was adamant that she never saw Phanthavong but came to realize it later.

On Sept. 2, 10 days after the crash, Nelson faxed a single-sentence statement to the State Patrol acknowledging Senser was the driver in the fatal crash. As testimony showed, Senser wanted it sent - against his advice - because her stepdaughter, Brittani, had feared people might think she'd been the one driving the Mercedes that night.

Brittani Senser told jurors that she had called Nelson and told him that if her mom didn't admit to police that she'd been driving, then Brittani would.

Brittani Senser, one of two children of Joe Senser's first marriage, was in the courtroom as the verdicts were read.

Noticeably absent from the courtroom during the verdicts was Anna Prasomphol Fieser, co-owner of True Thai and the person who hired Phanthavong as a dishwasher but realized within a week that he was better as a cook.

She'd been a fixture in court every day of the trial, sitting with the Phanthavong family and sometimes taking notes on the aisle seat on the front row of the left side of the courtroom. (Senser's family sat across the aisle in the front row on the right side.)

Reached later, she said she didn't come to court because she'd had a bad feeling about what the jury's verdicts might be.

"I told the family it was because I did not have a good feeling," she said. "I thought she was going to walk with the first counts, and I wouldn't know how to react.

"I'm OK now," she said.

Emily Gurnon contributed to this report. David Hanners can be reached at 612-338-6516.